Guilty until proven innocent! The Supreme Court has turned the Bill of Rights
upside down and joined the Congress of the United States in a massive assault
on the liberties of the American people. Little children now may be subjected
to government drug tests without a scintilla of evidence-or even suspicion-of
drug use. In a 6-3 ruling on a school district case out of central Oregon,
the Court decided that every child, in order to play badminton or volleyball
or football or handball, can be asked to provide a sample of urine to a stranger,
to the government, to some school operative. Here's what Associate Justice
Scalia said: "It seems to us self-evident that a drug problem largely fueled
by the role-model effect of athletes' drug use is effectively addressed by
making sure that athletes don't use drugs.

Is there a study to prove that a drug problem is "largely fueled by the
role-model effect of athletes' drug use"? How do we know this is what's fueling
the drug problem and not the 23 billion dollar-a-year drug war that is raising
the price of drugs astronomically-an irresistible pressure for young people
and others in our society? What about the drug problem fueled by the enforcement
agencies, by the intelligence agencies, by the U.S. government giving money
to corrupt drug-running generals in Haiti and Columbia and Central America-all
part of the foreign policy in Central America under Reagan and Bush?

In Drugs, Armies and the CIA in Central America, Dennis Daley, former chief
of an elite DEA enforcement unit, said, "In my 30-year history in the Drug
Enforcement Administration, the major targets of my investigations invariably
turned out to be working for the CIA." Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall,
in Cocaine Politics, point to Washington's covert operations overseas as
"a major factor in generating changes in the overall pattern of drug flows
in the United States." Their book has been out for three years and no one
has disputed their findings about the Vietnam-generated heroin epidemic of
the '60s, the Afghan-generated heroin epidemic of the '80s, and the Central
American cocaine epidemic of the Reagan years made possible by the Reagan-Bush
covert operation to overthrow the Nicaraguan Sandinistas. The Bank of Credit
and Commerce International (BCCI) was right there, opened branches in notorious
drug centers in South America and in Florida, handled accounts for 200 drug
traffickers and tax evaders, laundered nearly one billion dollars in Colombian
drug profits. So what's the government doing about that? Nothing! They let
them off the hook. They settled the case. They copped out. So much for
drug-testing the kids!

This is an effort to insinuate a fascist idea in the vulnerable, impressionable
minds of young children who have to give up a precious right, even before
they're aware they have it, in order to play sports. When are people more
vulnerable than standing naked in the bathroom, providing a urine sample?
Once you do that, it's embedded in your mind. You, as a person, have no dignity.
What do they do when they torture people, when they interrogate people? They
take their clothes off! That's what they're doing here. When Big Brother
says, "Take down your pants and urinate in this little bottle, so we can
take it to a laboratory and then tell you whether you're good or bad"-that's
a very insidious, destructive lesson. That's not going to teach someone to
be independent, to be a critical thinker, to have that spirit of rebellion
that built this country. That's another step forward in creating a nation
of sheep in a totalitarian state, saying, "Yes sir, yes sir! Is that what
you want? Do it to me again!" By the time they graduate, kids won't even
know they have rights. They'll be little stooges for a fascist state.

Here's what else Scalia said: "Deterring drug use by our nation's school
children is at least as important as enhancing enforcement of the nation's
laws against the importation of drugs." Making our laws effective against
importing drugs would be great. Tell that to the FBI and the CIA and the
Reagan and Bush administrations, the people bringing the stuff into Maine
and Arkansas, and the people who were swapping guns and drugs as part of
the Iran/Contra! But why would a law against importing a drug be the same
as random, invasive searches of the bodies of our nation's school children?
The two are not comparable at all.

Justice Scalia said the physical invasion would be negligible. "The conditions
of undergoing a drug test are nearly identical to those typically encountered
in public restrooms." In other words, when a man is standing next to a urinal,
that can be equated to a government agent telling you to provide a sample
of your urine out of your body? Having to offer up bodily fluid is a violation
of your right not to incriminate yourself!

Sandra Day O'Connor wrote in dissent, "This ruling means that millions of
student athletes, an overwhelming majority of whom have given school officials
no reason whatsoever to suspect they use drugs at school, are open to an
intrusive bodily search." The dissenters blasted the majority for ignoring
years of precedent requiring individualized suspicion of wrongdoing for
government searches. They criticized intrusive blanket searches of school
children, most of whom are innocent. The High Court has only upheld suspicionless
drug testing in the past in a case of train railroad personnel involved in
train accidents and federal customs officers who carry weapons or who are
involved in drug interdiction.

Here's what the White House had to say about the decision. Clinton welcomed
it. (If Clinton's two appointees had voted the other way, the case would
have been struck down.) He said, "It sends exactly the right message to parents
and students. Drug use will not be tolerated at our schools." Clinton, you're
dead wrong! This isn't the right message! It tells parents they do not really
have children who belong to them. Their children can be tested and probed
and poked and looked at and used for somebody's campaign. Clinton is jumping
on this because he needs to win over the South; he needs some conservative
cover.

Lee Brown, the czar of national drug policy, hailed the ruling saying, "It
gives school districts around the country another weapon in their arsenal
to combat drug use and drug related violence among America's youth." Get
that! Another weapon! The children are the enemy, folks, as is your freedom!
Make no mistake about it. We have 44 million children from kindergarten through
high school. How many tens of millions of drug searches? How often?

Sandra Day O'Connor said, "It cannot be too often stated that the greatest
threats to our constitutional freedoms come in times of crisis. I cannot
avoid the conclusion that the suspicionless policy of testing all student
athletes sweeps too broadly and too imprecisely to be reasonable under the
constitution."

Real kudos to Sandra Day O'Connor, John Paul Stevens, and David Souter. Their
dissent points out that mass searches without suspicion of wrongdoing have
been illegal for most of U.S. history. Now the war is in the classroom, another
step in getting Americans to accept the loss of liberty, the loss of the
Fifth Amendment, the right not to incriminate themselves-and doing it in
the most infamous, deceitful, despicable way, to kids who don't have the
maturity and the critical faculty to fight back!

School is about teaching children. If the child doesn't do well, if the child
doesn't pay attention, if he is stumbling along the field high as a kite,
if there's a report of drug use-fine, take action. On the other hand, if
you can't tell that anything's wrong, why do you need a drug test? In that
case, the kid is not going to be a "role model for using drugs," is he? Either
way, there is no justification for this invasive testing of kids' bodily
fluids. I remember being in high school when a bunch of the football players
went to the field house where they got drunk one night and tore the place
up. They were punished, but they weren't kicked out, and there was no testing.
People could figure this stuff out. To bring in the apparatus of a licensed
drug testing, profit-making company and then start applying this to 40 million
U.S. kids and then feed that back into our taxes, how in the world are we
going to have enough money to teach the kids what they're supposed to learn?
And who do you think is going to lobby for these tests? When you're on the
school board, running for election, you're going to want some money, right?
Drug testing pays back potential campaign contributors and creates a gigantic
multi-million dollar industry that, I promise you, a year from now will be
ten times as big as it is today. Here the system is creating an industry
around the drug issue when it does nothing to stop the corrupt military that
moves the drugs, and the big banks that are all in cahoots with the President
and the big shots in the Congress. That is where the problem is-not a bunch
of little kids who don't even exhibit symptoms.

Do you think a good private school is going to have random drug testing?
They wouldn't need it. The parents would scream bloody murder. People who
come out of upper-class families go to private schools where there's no testing.
And if the government said they were going to test for alcohol, you can be
sure that Budweiser and all the big liquor companies would kill it. See?
Look at what this is-politics, pure and simple!

Let me be real clear about the whole matter of drugs and terrorism. The
government is looking at poor people in ghettos, they're looking at peasants
in the hills of Peru and Colombia, they're looking at school children to
get their urine samples, but they're not looking at the politicians, the
enforcement intelligence agencies, their buddies the bankers, the jet-setters,
and all the other big shots that are bringing the drugs into this country.
And all the while they're coming up with new stuff like the Anti-terrorism
Bill which enlarges government in frightening, unprecedented ways.

Here is the final coup de grace to American freedom. I'm reading from Section
315 of the latest House Bill to combat terrorism. The new definition of terrorism
means "the use of force in violation of the criminal laws of the United States,
or of any state, that appears to be intended to achieve political or social
ends by intimidating a segment of the population or by influencing a government
official or officials." Is that terrorism, or is that labor union activity?
Is that terrorism or civil rights sit-ins? Is that citizens acting in solidarity?
Is that a consumer boycott? Is that a scuffle out there while having protected
associational rights to march down a street? With Section 315, there is no
more dissent! Forget it! The police can push you around, get a few people
to start a few fights and pretty soon there is a terrorist act because you've
broken the peace, some kind of disturbance. It didn't say it had to be a
felony. It said it had to be a criminal law of a state or the United States.
This is federalizing under the term terrorism every two-bit criminal statute
that may happen to exist in this country. And there are tens of thousands
of them.

You don't even have to intend to achieve a political or social end by your
act. It just has to appear that way. The other element is intimidating some
people, some segment of the population, or influencing a government official.
Some civil rights/civil disobedience marching could get out of hand-a very
minor violation of law. But converted into "terrorism"-a federal
crime-wiretapping, infiltration, surveillance, draconian penalties, the entire
weight of government can now be invoked against you. That's what's happening.
This is not your local police. This is a federal government, that apparently
knows no limit.

The bill would also make nonviolent, peaceful, protected political activity
into a crime and impose a ten-year imprisonment on citizens and deportation
of non-citizens for doing nothing more than supporting lawful activities
of an organization that engages in both lawful and unlawful activities. The
net here is going to be very hard to escape if you should oppose the government.

This bill authorizes unlimited preventative detention, preventative surveillance
(surveilling people before they do wrong). David Cole, a lawyer who testified
at the hearing, said, "These bills [the anti-terrorism bills going through
Congress] would have the effect of authorizing, indeed obligating, the FBI
to investigate, infiltrate, and conduct surveillance on a myriad of domestic
charitable, religious, and political organizations that provide humanitarian
aid and political support for organizations engaged in struggle abroad."

It's called anti-terrorism, but it's really a blanket authority on the part
of the state to snuff out any kind of opposition. Dissent, civil disobedience,
used to be a proud tradition in this country, practiced by Martin Luther
King. It's the way Ghandi liberated India. It has been the stuff of American
independence, and it's about to be snuffed out, with the media quiet and
complicit, the liberal and conservative politicians, like yapping dogs, going
along with Clinton to prop him up so that they can get themselves a buddy
in the White House again.

This is bigger and wider than the Communist control net. This is making Joe
McCarthy look like a piker. Joe McCarthy had a reign of terror with his
insinuations and innuendoes against anybody who was red, pink, or a fellow
traveler. Now they've got a word that is much more elastic. They've got
terrorist. And to top it off Clinton starts his pro-police expansion of the
death penalty operation. The NRA gets an unfavorable story because they've
been attacking the ATF. Now the IRS is going after them. I've never been
a big NRA supporter but I find it very suspicious that all this stuff comes
down in the same 30 days. Step by step, they are shaping the laws of this
country, and now they are working on the minds of children to get them habituated
to bowing down to increasing government authority.

When I say the U. S. government is taking another step down the road to
totalitarianism, I'm not just saying that for rhetorical effect. There is
a systematic movement to extinguish the liberties of the American people.
If the American people do not begin to resist very soon, their capacity to
do so will be severely curtailed. Please call "We The People," in Oakland,
1-800-426-1112 or write us at 200 Harrison St., Oakland, CA 94607. We'll
send you some material and ask you to join our efforts. Together we can build
a new movement of real democratic activism.